With reasonable frequency I encounter people who are convinced that prayers of confession are all about making the person who prays them feel “judged” or “inferior”. Nothing could be further from the truth and place of confession and absolution in the eucharistic liturgy underlines that fact. At the end of the prayers of the people, we are invited to confess our sins “against God and our neighbor”. The priest offers words of absolution and then we extend the peace of... Read more
Years ago… I visited the Martin Luther King Center and purchased a children’s biography of King for my six year old daughter. This led to a collection of King biographies that over the years have grown in sophistication. When she was nine, she played on a frequent basis with a large number of other children in the cathedral close in Jerusalem. Among her friends was Jamie, a younger Canadian boy, and Alex, an American who had a reputation for being... Read more
Not long ago, we all believed that Covid would be a short-lived phenomenon. We can all remember a time when we hoped to “beat the curve.” We would avoid overloading our emergency rooms, emerge on the other side, and move on. Most of us opted to stay at home and distance, thinking that the impact on people who couldn’t work from home would amount to a matter of days. No one was thinking about variants. And no one – including... Read more
It is difficult to measure the significance of a life and even harder to measure it at a distance. Alongside Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was obviously a central figure in ending apartheid in his native South Africa and a unique voice in healing differences between rival factions following the election of 1994. But it will take some time to fully grasp the impact of his ministry both in South Africa and around the world as a voice for... Read more
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. There was a man sent from God,... Read more
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. There was a man sent from God, whose name... Read more
As Christmas approaches many of us will be grappling with the loss of those we love. And the holiday celebrations will lend a particular poignancy to those losses. There will be people missing from the pews alongside us as we worship. There will be empty chairs at the dinner table. Family rituals, familiar topics of conversation, and endearing behaviors will be missing from the fabric from our celebration. Such experiences have an irreducibly autobiographical character to them. While we can... Read more
John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear... Read more
I doubt that any of us watched the news without being shaken by the pictures of devastation across Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Illinois, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Towns were shattered. Over two hundred miles of countryside were raked clean by just one of the tornados. And it is still impossible to know how many people lost their lives in a storm caught people unprepared and unprotected. Years of recovery work lie ahead of the more immediate task of attending to the dead... Read more
It appears that the world will be spared experimentation with the exterior of Notre Dame Cathedral. The French government caved to the outrage expressed by the citizens of Paris, and it will be restored to its former glory. But Christians can’t hope that the sacred space within the Cathedral will be treated with the same care. The current proposal for the restoration of the Cathedral’s interior marks a radical departure from the one lost in the fire. Confessionals, altars in... Read more
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